Global Health

Global Health

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While important progress has been made connecting patients to essential treatment, millions of people continue to die unnecessarily from AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis, and other treatable diseases. And access to critical medicines and diagnostics is often limited in resource-poor settings, resulting in dire consequences for some of the world’s most vulnerable populations. The Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI), a separate, affiliated entity, works to strengthen in-country health systems and improve global markets for medicines and diagnostics – ensuring lifesaving treatments and care can reach the people who need them the most. CHAI's goal is to transform these systems and ensure they develop into self-sustaining methods of providing low-cost, high-quality care.

Our Work on Global Health

The world spends billions of dollars each year developing drugs, vaccines, and other lifesaving interventions to help low-income countries. However, every dollar spent is wasted if there is no health worker to provide these essential health services to patients.

When the Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI) was founded in 2002, only 200,000 people were receiving treatment for HIV/AIDS in low and middle income countries, with medicines that cost over $10,000 per person per year.

In the past decade, remarkable advances have been made in treating and preventing malaria. Better medicines and long-lasting bed nets have been developed. Donor funding for malaria control has dramatically increased from $153 million in 2000 to over $1 billion in 2010.

Building on the work of the Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI), a separate, affiliated entity, to scale up HIV testing and treatment for children, CHAI’s Prevention of Mother-to-Child Transmission (PMTCT) program takes a comprehensive approach to stopping new pediatric infections.

Working with the governments of developing countries and the pharmaceutical industry, the Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI), a separate, affiliated entity, has helped dramatically lower the cost of lifesaving medicines and diagnostics for HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis.

Most low-income countries have national immunization programs that routinely vaccinate 70 to 90 percent of their infants. The eight vaccines included in most programs, together, usually cost less than $20 per infant.

When the Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI), a separate, affiliated entity, began working on pediatric HIV/AIDS in 2005, kids were being left behind. Only one in 40 children in need were on treatment, compared to one in eight adults.

The Laboratory Services Team, housed under the Access to Medicines program of the Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI), a separate, affiliated entity, works to increase patients’ access to rapid, accurate, and cost-efficient diagnostics.

More About Global Health

Although treatments exist for infectious diseases such as HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis, the developing world has had limited access to these treatments because of their high cost. A decade ago, only 200,000 people in developing countries were receiving treatment, with medicines that could cost over $10,000 per person annually. At its most basic level, this problem was one of economics: the market for these medicines was disorganized and operating at a low-volume, high-cost model. And developing health systems lacked the infrastructure to diagnose and treat patients properly.

By collaborating with manufacturers on the supply side and governments on the demand side – and transitioning the market to a high-volume, low-cost model – CHAI has reduced the cost of key drugs and enabled millions of people to receive lifesaving treatment. CHAI began its work in the Bahamas, and today, more than 70 countries are benefiting from treatments and diagnostics at prices that CHAI has helped to negotiate.

CHAI has applied this model to address treatments for malaria, diarrhea, and tuberculosis, to improve access to diagnostics, and to scale up the delivery of lifesaving vaccines in countries such as India, Cambodia, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, and Uganda – where providers and consumers are often unaware of the recommended drugs or vaccines. By partnering with governments to address these challenges, CHAI has also helped to create evidence-based solutions that are tailor-made to each country's needs, and has helped developing countries save more than $3 billion since 2007. And through human resources for health programs, CHAI is working with governments to improve medical and health education to a generation of health professionals. CHAI continues to work to economize and improve care in developing countries, with an ultimate goal of fundamentally changing the economics of global health and building health systems that are self-sustaining.